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TIFU by using Stripe as a payment processor for my small business
- shmde 4y agohttps://teddit.net/r/tifu/comments/wa230m/tifu_by_using_stripe_as_a_payment_processor_for/ https://teddit.net/r/tifu/comments/wa230m/tifu_by_using_stri...
- Traubenfuchs 4y agoCount to three for someone from Stripe appearing here, apologizing and fixing the issue.
- sys42590 4y agoWell, fixing this specific case does not equal to fixing the issue in general. The morale of the story is that you should not behave like Google if you aren't as big as Google...
- wonderbore 4y ago> you should not behave like Google I’d end it there.
- Crosseye_Jack 4y agoYup, how many times have we seen it here on HN alone where someone has posted “Google nuked us from the Play store and won’t talk to us about it” only to be returned after the post hit the front page? People shouldn’t have to go viral on social media to get decent customer service just because “computer says no.”
- lotophage 4y ago> More disconcerting, it seems that anyone who posts about this issue on reddit gets downvoted and teamed up against by established Reddit accounts, that I have to imagine are owned by Stripe. These account have some established reddit history on them, mainly talking about coding in PERL. It's a little sus. I too am a little suspicious of anyone who codes in PERL
- Bayart 4y agoTry doing RegEx with Bash's native engine before you start judging us :(
- omginternets 4y agoWe’re judging you for the regexes ;)
- TheNewsIsHere 4y agoThat’s no joke! I have only ever been able to write successfully portable RegEx in Bash by evaluating using Perl.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- orangepanda 4y ago> You can only email. If you email, you get robots. Their dev support on discord is S-tier, but every now and then some issue has to be moved to email support; where it dies. It always takes months for something to be resolved, if at all. My only consolation is that every other provider is just as terrible.
- dekken_ 4y ago> Their dev support on discord This is also a red flag
- samber 4y agoStripe is developer centric. Discord has a lot of developers in their community. I don't really like Discord, but i must admit it is a smart choice.
- mabbo 4y agoRight, but what if my mother wants to start a business? She's not a developer. Should she avoid Stripe? What kind of company builds itself as only being a product usable by developers? We're a small niche market at best.
- thatguy0900 4y agoI would hope your mother is hiring a developer to build her payment infrastructure if standard over the counter solutions like those iPhone swipe attachments don't work for her.
- whateveracct 4y agoA normal forum would be better in most ways.
- km3k 4y ago> Stripe is developer centric. What kind of excuse is that? I've seen so many small businesses using Stripe. I doubt all their owners are developers who are comfortable with Discord.
- kweks 4y agoYou can try contacting Edwin ( edwin@stripe.com ) - he's often on HN and has unstuck quite a few Stripe issues for me and other HNers.
- coolgoose 4y agoI appreciate your comment but this is a clear example their internal flow is fucked up.
- kweks 4y agoYou are correct, but the aim of the reddit post / this post is to get the problem solved. Billing is a complicated subject, and fraud is even more complicated. A well placed, polite email to C-level staff often fixes the problem, but can draw attention to flaws in the support flow - or validate a customer-hostile standpoint, at which point you can make an informed decision about where to place your business.
- ryanbrunner 4y agoI've definitely never encountered many automated responses to their e-mail support. Definitely I've hit support people who don't know much beyond basic troubleshooting, and it's pretty much impossible to get escalated to the point where you're talking directly to a dev through support@, but generally not canned responses. (That might be based on our usage maybe, we're a OK sized Connect partner)
- ceejayoz 4y agoA lot of organizations route suspended accounts through an entirely different support team focused on fraud. That team is often not a management priority, either.
- vemv 4y agoIf it was, say, a $30000 charge I could give Stripe the benefit of doubt, but $3300 is a pretty ordinary amount for any retailer. Could be e.g. a laptop sale, or three phones? When I see Stripe's apology here it will not be enough for me - not at least without a detailed blog post / postmortem. Until/if that moment happens, I'll regard Stripe as an untrustworthy entity and will recommend doing the same to do anyone I do business with. Zero tolerance for Google-style algo-decisions and stonewalling.
- w4ffl35 4y agoi will be keeping all of this in mind the next time im making payment processing decisions for small businesses.
- leoff 4y ago> When I see Stripe's apology here it will not be enough for me I'm actually just starting a business using Stripe for handling payments, and this makes me very concerned. Is there an alternative service one could use? Is there a way not to give these shady companies power to steal all my money?
- informalo 4y agohttps://sumup.com https://sumup.com
- Ayesh 4y agoIn a different HN thread that has no or positive reaction to Stripe, you'd be seeing many praises for Stripe. For local businesses, perhaps your local bank has a better solution? They will be cheaper (if they use networks other than Visa/Master), and often has zero fees when you withdraw money to a bank account. Here in my country, for a business that only caters to local customers, I pay about 2% for payments with no fixed fee and no fee for withdrawals, which happens daily. I can directly call the person who handles my queries, and charge backs have never been anything but a few quick clicks with no mind games. All I do is redirect the user to the payment page, and validate the payment upon arrival. The UX isn't as good as Stripe of course, but many of the locals are quite used to that UI anyway.
- whatisweb3 4y agoHopefully making enough noise on HN and social media will help your case move quickly. That appears to be the only way to get a response these days. Maybe one day non-custodial and permissionless payment rails will prevent this situation, for those services that choose to use it. Shame that HN is so polarized about blockchain that they refuse to entertain the idea.
- AdrianEGraphene 4y agoAFAIK, there are no permissionless payment rail that do fiat-> crypto payment processing. They all require intermediaries and presumably would run into similar issues. Crypto-> crypto would be a different story, but requires a more sophisticated buyer. I play in this space, so would definitely like to hear what you've got in mind.
- whatisweb3 4y agoImagining either crypto to crypto, or a permissioned rollup handling crypto to fiat that lets the sequencer block a users address for KYC purposes, but user can still trustlessly withdraw funds to mainnet.
- negamax 4y agoBut what about the people who don't have social clout? I think for every person like this, there are 100s if not thousands who's money and accounts get locked away.
- whatisweb3 4y agoThat’s my point. A system where your funds are locked unless your complaint goes viral is a terrible system.
- noasaservice 4y agoThis is a *legal* issue,and not a shitcoin-solving issue.
- schnebbau 4y agoAs Stripe keeps growing this seems to be a more recurring problem, as it seems to be with most companies that eventually get too big to care about the little guy. Which leads to my question: is there a smaller alternative similar to the Stripe of five years ago which might appreciate our business more?
- Aeolun 4y agoAnd hopefully stays small. And does processing for any country, not just 3 states in the US :/
- pixiemaster 4y ago„Too Big To Care“
- vxxzy 4y agoPastePay is a great alt to Stripe. Check them out https://www.pastepay.com https://www.pastepay.com. I posted this elsewhere in this comment section. PastePay is a “smaller service”. It is more customer focused than Stripe.
- ciguy 4y agoStripe is going the way of PayPal it seems. Many people learned this lesson the hard way with PayPal now they will learn it with Stripe I guess. You have no real recourse when these companies decide to steal your money and their incentives are very much to do so as they get to hang onto it for extended periods. I don't think it's a coincidence that this happened as we go into economic downturn and layoffs. Too bad they're not a public company, if they were I would be shorting their stock right now.
- wonderbore 4y agoFirst thing I thought. PayPal is known to pull this kind of moves, now it’s Stripe’s turn to steal some money “for security.”
- aga98mtl 4y agoStripe like paypal is not to blame in this story. The problem is the credit card payment standard. Transactions can be charged back up to 180 days. This means that by giving the merchant the money right away, Stripe runs the risk that a transaction will be charged back and that the merchant wont have fund to cover it. Stripe like any other processor runs an algo to determine the risk profile of each transaction to decide if you get the money immediately or not. If you have a sudden high ticket transaction, the odds this will be charged back are much higher. This is why they freeze that money up to 180 days. It sucks, but it is how the credit card system works. Someone has to cover the chargeback risk.
- christkv 4y agoIn the EU most countries have a financial sector regulator. If this happens in the EU and a payment provider does not respond contact them as it will light a fire under their seats.
- xdrosenheim 4y agoStripe responded to a Twitter post about it, Reddit helped retweeting it. https://twitter.com/GenosAtHonda/status/1552588035077726208 https://twitter.com/GenosAtHonda/status/1552588035077726208
- rutierut 4y agoThis type of canned response is so repulsive, I imagine the only reason why it might be a good idea to send things like this is because it's less offensive than nothing and just as expensive.
- lma21 4y agoAnd they didn't help whatsoever
- bufferoverflow 4y agoWow, that's an insane way to treat customers. No explanation of any kind. I guess I won't be using Stripe anymore.
- registeredcorn 4y agohttps://twitter.com/stripe/status/1552613789706567680 https://twitter.com/stripe/status/1552613789706567680 I'll wait with bated breath.
- a2tech 4y agoThis is now on the front page of Reddit. Someone at Stripe PR is going to have a bad morning.
- sph 4y agoThey'll soon be here saying sorry, CEO will be in touch with you and will sort this out immediately.
- busymom0 4y agoAs someone who’s recently looking into using stripe for a small business, this makes me hesitant. And this isn’t the first time I have read this type of thing about them. Google also does this sort of stuff with canned robot responses for play store developers.
- polux33 4y ago
- sofixa 4y agoNobody is saying there's no use case for cryptocurrencies. However they absolutely suck in the main use case - payments. There are no chargebacks/protections against scams, the UX is atrocious or relies on an unregulated and unprotected third party. It's slow, it costs money to spend money. And it's also destroying the planet with useless electricity consumption when there's an energy crisis and climate change with resulting need for transition going on. All the rest hippie anarchist bullshit "take control", "inflation", "fiat" etc. is just bullshit that's either idealistic to the point of stupid or just stupid.
- anonymoushn 4y agoHmm, seems like this guy wouldn't get his $3,000 stolen if he got paid SPL USDC. The transaction would also cost less energy than it did through Stripe.
- ceejayoz 4y ago"Circle Confirms Freezing $100K in USDC at Law Enforcement's Request" https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2020/07/08/circle-confirms-freezing-100k-in-usdc-at-law-enforcements-request/ https://www.coindesk.com/markets/2020/07/08/circle-confirms-...
- polux33 4y agoFunny because you sound like a guy that could claim crypto is an unregulated far west full or scammers, while trying to prove that seizing 100K at law enforcement request is the same as randomly keeping 3K of your customers funds.
- ceejayoz 4y agoYou seem to think "we can freeze your funds" isn't an appealing feature to scammers, which is odd. https://www.circle.com/en/legal/usdc-terms https://www.circle.com/en/legal/usdc-terms > If Circle suspects or determines that you or any of your authorized users or customers, as applicable, have violated this these Terms, including, but not limited to, attempting to transact or transacting with Blocked Addresses (as defined in Section 13) or attempting to engage or engaging in Restricted Activities or Prohibited Transactions, and you have a Circle Account, then Circle may be forced to terminate your Circle Account and you may forfeit any USD funds otherwise eligible for redemption. The list of "Restricted Activities" this applies to is quite broad, including "provide false, inaccurate, or misleading information". The parent poster's claim this couldn't happen with USDC is readily proven false.
- lma21 4y agoYet another story of Stripe holding big sums (yes 3k can be huge for small businesses) with no proper support structure. Consumers must rely on social networks to get some form of reaction.A $74 billion company has no proper support structure. Just wow.
- xyzzy_plugh 4y agoI'm sympathetic that 3k can be huge for small businesses, but if you can't tolerate a loss of 3k, isn't your business practically doomed?
- enlyth 4y agoMaybe your business is not your primary source of income?
- moralestapia 4y agoWhat is this, really? Is this meant to defend Stripe? What a weird way of looking at things.
- xyzzy_plugh 4y agoA single instance of holding 3k doesn't seem like (or shouldn't be) a significant amount for a small business.
- davidkuennen 4y agoIf you're self employed and your monthly income is 5k$ from your business, 3k is a lot and can mean that you're unable to pay bills or food for this month.
- chrisseaton 4y agoIf you have no issue losing 3k without any reason, can I have 3k from your business as well?
- Apreche 4y agoThis is a case for the state attorney general (or equivalent legal authority wherever this person lives).
- negamax 4y agoI have no idea how companies like Stripe and to a great extent Revolut made it to forefront of banking. They are Uber of banking industry. And have done shady things. As the time passes and VC money runs out; these companies will implode
- nostrebored 4y agoAs someone who’s worked there: stripe won’t. Everyone in the company can see the business metrics. People wouldn’t be staying if that were true.
- negamax 4y agoI have a close friend, working for Uber since 5-6 years now. I don't think he ever expected company to engage in anything shady. SWEs are higher up than service counter staff but in the game of business they are not far from being expensive pawns. Sorry
- xyzzy_plugh 4y agoSo he started 5-6 years ago, after Uber was already caught doing shady shit? Does not compute. I don't think Uber was ever particularly transparent, whereas I believe the other poster was implying that all Stripe employees can see revenue, profit margin, etc. plainly, which seems very uncommon for a non-public corp.
- negamax 4y agoI don't remember their exact date. It's been a long time. They joined before IPO. My point was it was fairly long
- epolanski 4y agoStripe has an excellent developer experience which makes it easy to integrate it online.
- 4y ago
- nsmog767 4y agoam I the only person here eagerly scrolling through the comments to see if "pc" chimes in??
- mkl 4y agoPossibly. You can just check his comments to see that he hasn't as of this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pc https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pc
- ericpauley 4y ago>You cannot call Stripe. They do not have a phone number. Not sure whether this person was specifically locked out or something, but I've had consistently good experience with Stripe's phone support. As they note email (and chat) are a joke, but phone reps are highly knowledgeable and have quickly resolved my issues.
- rahkiin 4y agoAccording to the reddit thread, when your account is locked, the ‘Chat’ and ‘Give me a call’ options get grayed out.
- SpicyLemonZest 4y agoBut is that, you know, true? The HN front page gives a stunning amount of credulity to unverified stories from random people on social media.
- rahkiin 4y agoI do not know. I only state what the original author posted. Maybe someone is willing to create a Stripe account and trigger a block to test it. Edit: another thread 3 years ago mentions the same: “I tried to contact support by chat or phone, but it seems that when they suspend an acct, they block your ability to contact support by any method except by email...” [0] [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21031665 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21031665
- anonymousab 4y agoStripe folks have confirmed that they will only allow certain support channels when certain situations come up (I'd imagine certain types of assumed fraud would merit async channels only, etc.). It's just a crazy coincidence that they also won't tell you the underlying truths to the situation that would let you understand why they aren't letting you call them. Surely they are reasonable and not just standard corpo tech negligent customer support. Surely.
- thiscatis 4y agoWatch the Stripe apologist come out in force soon. They’ll brand you as 100% running a crypto CP arms dealing coke selling dark net platform owner because surely YC darling Stripe would never mess up like this. Truth is they are just horrible.
- rvz 4y agoExactly. The Stripe fans and its nobility will try to keep boosting Stripe's sainthood as if they do no wrong or won't kill your business if you had fraudulent chargebacks (also known as friendly fraud) and will make sure they are only the exception. In reality, you are going to get destroyed by Stripe with such large payments, even if they are not fraudulent. They actually are killing businesses when they do that and locking their accounts down for months. Even if you have a sum like that for a business or it was an error, well good luck with support as you are not getting that money back and your business will end up shutting down. That is the dark truth that the Stripe boosters and that the hype squad won't tell you.
- powerhour 4y agoYou called it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32263429 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32263429
- thiscatis 4y agoUnbelievable right, going through someone’s reddit history to try to defend a corporation and do some victim blaming.
- upupandup 4y agoThere are also apologists for coinbase. I wonder if these are paid "internet agencies" that realize that brand management is increasingly done through social media.
- whiddershins 4y agoI’ve heard stories like this about PayPal, I have a friend who claimed Chase Bank bankrupted his business in the 90s … I’m thinking all financial players sometimes do stuff like this?
- xyzzy_plugh 4y agoThis isn't surprising to me, and I don't think less of Stripe for doing this. It appears everybody is jumping to conclusions. Saying Stripe is "stealing" is laughable. There is a tremendous amount of fraud abound. Payment service providers like Stripe sit in between businesses and credit card companies, who proxy banks, who proxy customers. Banks are pretty solid, as are credit card companies, so the transitive nature of these transactions means Stripe proxies customers. A significant feature of modern payment processing is the ability to reconcile fraud for either party, but typically these measures are structured in a way to protect the customer. For example, you buy a $3000 computer and the business goes under before they can ship it to you. It's likely you can get your money back by calling your credit card company but it's not like they're being generous. What happens is exactly what is happening here: Money is held until it can be safely cleared without dispute; money is clawed back from merchant bank accounts and held until it can be cleared (there is practically no limit to what can be clawed back out of your merchant bank account). If this makes you uncomfortable, don't deal with credit card companies, and only take cash. It doesn't matter who your payment processor is, this can and will happen with any of them. I'm sympathetic to the OP here, but from a business perspective, the fact that this is such a significant event is a red flag. Shit happens -- your credit card could be stolen, you could be robbed, you could be defrauded -- it's prudent to have a safety net for when such things occur. And while realistically such safety can be unreasonable to secure, that just signals to me that so much of society is living at the edge of a knife. It's easy to be angry at Stripe here, but I believe that's misguided.
- nfreising 4y agoI don't think Stripe holding money is the problem here. The problem to me seems that there is no support to be reached at Stripe to dispute their decision or get a human to answer. I agree that OP's business doesn't seem that healthy if $3000 are such a big problem, however that doesn't make Stripe's non-existing support any better.
- xyzzy_plugh 4y agoI've dealt with Stripe support and it's been... fine? Good even? I can only assume that if they've gone radio silent there's a reason. I'm not convinced Stripe is acting in bad faith, as shitty as this is. (Unlike, say, PayPal, who is notorious for shit like this). At least one instance I'm aware of has to do with anti-money laundering regulations, where it can be disallowed to communicate regarding a pending investigation, but obviously I can't speak to if that's happening here.
- graderjs 4y agoThis is not my experience of Stripe. I've found their support has always been responsive and awesome over email.
- redeeman 4y agoThis "rant" is in general, and not related to OPs case I would strongly recommend to not rely on stripe, their service level has become a joke. I get it, they have a nice API, their system is technically nice in many ways, and they are (or atleast were ~5 years ago) way easier to deal with for developers than the "old" players on the market. but they are kinda like google, their support is pretty much non existent when things arent on the "happy path", they will GLADLY ignore any inquiry for months if they feel like it, I know this for bitter personal experience. Yeah, their fees might be slightly lower than the older players, but the old ones you could call if it comes to it, and they will NOT be doing the same shenanigans on a whim, as it appears Stripe do.
- hnarn 4y agoWhich “old ones” are you referring to more specifically?
- apocalyptic0n3 4y agoAuthorize.net is the old one that Stripe always seems to be compared against. And in that race... Stripe has already crossed the finish line before Authorize.net has taken its first step.
- redeeman 4y agoi do not want to name specific names, but in my neighborhood theres a couple of big online payment processors that until somewhat "recently" were the ones that 99.9% of online shops used. I imagine it be roughly similar in other places, though perhaps more the bigger the country
- armatav 4y agoYeah be that as it may - it's still the easiest option that actually works. And honestly I feel like Stripe actually responds to support tickets that are related to the integrations side in like half an hour.
- redeeman 4y ago
- ellieh 4y agoDoes anyone have any suggestions of what to use instead? Lots of "don't use Stripe", but I'd love to know what the alternatives are!
- pier25 4y agoFor a hobby project of mine I use Gumroad. The integration on my website is bad... But payments and payouts have been solid so far.
- quelltext 4y agohttps://help.gumroad.com/article/260-your-payout-settings-page https://help.gumroad.com/article/260-your-payout-settings-pa... Gumroad itself uses Stripe, it seems so if Stripe decides to hold funds it's likely Gumroad will just forward that experience to you.
- pier25 4y agoYeah but AFAIK it's only for payouts and not for charging to the end customer.
- peanuty1 4y agoSquare is one option. https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square/payments-api https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square/payments-api
- thallium205 4y agoIt's called placing a reserve on the account and it is something any payment processor will do to a merchant account.
- wrycoder 4y agoSure, and OP understands that. But, there’s apparently no effective resolution process, especially one involving a human. What would you suggest the OP do to resolve their issue?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- thallium205 4y agoThere is no "resolution" to the situation. His account has a reserve on it and it may stay there for the entire lifetime of the account. He has to just deal with it.
- wrycoder 4y agoReserve isn’t much of a problem. Never getting your funds is different.
- mission_failed 4y agoYes banks regularly seize money from accounts for hundreds of days and refuse to discuss it with paying customers /s
- thallium205 4y agoActually, they do. And they will hold reserves on accounts for many months to over a year if they suspect it may be fraud. The acquiring bank does this because the risk of a chargeback is high and their ability to recoup the funds may be diminished with a small account. I've been in high risk merchant processing for almost a decade. The merchant may never get the money back until they close the account completely and wait half a year for a check in the mail.
- Tomte 4y agoWelcome to the Stripe support forum! A founder will be here momentarily.
- psyc 4y agoOr the Content & Communications guy.
- username_my1 4y agoany day now
- jeroenhd 4y agoYou're not wrong: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32263901 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32263901
- upupandup 4y agoWhich country can I incorporate in so I can pay the least amount of taxes by using Stripe? Gibraltar?
- verdverm 4y agoYou typically pay on behalf of the user, in their local jurisdiction, so where you are matters not.
- iuiz 4y ago
- ziddoap 4y agoWhat relevance does any of that have when OP has supporting documents for this specific transaction, which is the only transaction Stripe has issue with and the only issue that OP is trying to resolve?
- mitchdoogle 4y agoWe don't know what relevance it might have, but it shows the OP participates in risky ventures in a sector with a lot of fraud. There could certainly be some part of the story that is important that OP chose to leave out because it makes him look bad.
- ziddoap 4y ago>We don't know what relevance it might have Seriously? It has absolutely no bearing on the transaction in question. Hashcat? OpenDNS? A question about Elon? I mean I know HN hates cryptocurrency with a fiery passion... But that has no influence whatsoever on this specific transaction for which OP claims to have all the documentation for (it wasn't a cryptocurrency transaction, so why would interest in BTC be relevant to the transaction?) This has to be one of the worst sides of the internet. User posts issue X, and other users spend all of their time looking through post history so they can shame them and come up with some twisted reasoning that X is justified.
- registeredcorn 4y agoI'm sure the alternative would go over well too. "This guy used a throwaway account to report a problem! Seems a little suspicious. What are they trying to hide?"
- austenallred 4y agoHaving watched a lot of these stories go down one thread in many of them is Stripe was required by some combination of regulators/banks to freeze funds of someone who has been selling cannabis, and because of privacy cannot openly say that such is the case. The person proceeds to escalate and escalate through every customer service option (including Reddit, HN) not necessarily because they’re not getting a response, but because it’s not the response they want. I don’t know if that’s true here, but I’ve seen it happen internally with YC companies many times.
- sph 4y agoYou either die a promising startup, or live long enough to see yourself become just another Paypal.
- mitchdoogle 4y agoOne thing stripe still has going for it is that it has a great user experience, both for businesses and developers. PayPal can't say that
- sph 4y agoI have used Paypal almost daily as a user for more than a decade and it's never failed for me either. Stripe originally was great because they had a simple API, developer-oriented focus, and IIRC cheaper than Paypal. And I bet better customer service because they were smaller. Nowadays it's not cheaper, the customer service isn't any better, and my snarky comment isn't too far off from reality.
- User23 4y agoMore and more it feels like the legal department is the only reliable way to get in touch with a human being. This sounds like a job for small claims.
- psyfi 4y agoTake them to attribution?
- mwexler 4y agoDid you mean arbitration?
- davidkuennen 4y agoI feel this. Today many people got this message from Apple (apparently wrongly): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32260733 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32260733 which would've resulted in Apple holding a lot of money from me which is business critical. For payment processing, something like this without a means to appeal quickly shouldn't be allowed. It endangers companies and the livelihood of many people.
- stef25 4y agoFWIW it's totally possible to talk to someone at Stripe. We got someone on the line and successfully negotiated their fees. We're now using a 2nd payment processor that handles a type of payment unavailable at Stripe and they're just garbage compared to Stripe's backend / control panel system, which is phenomenally. Excellent company as far as I'm concerned.
- danpalmer 4y agoI built the Stripe integration for a medium sized online retailer, and our experience wasn't quite as good as this. Our COO could get them on the line to negotiate our contract, but our engineers struggled to get useful answers out of them via email and our account manager often took weeks and multiple pings to respond to product questions. I have had amazing success chatting with their engineers on IRC, but it's fairly unofficial, they're limited in what they can do when things concern user data, and I don't think most customers should need to get on IRC for support. As for competitors though, I've heard from a customer "Stripe treat taking payments as a business, $competitor treats taking payments as a hobby". On balance, while not perfect, I'd probably choose Stripe again, but I'd get an account manager ASAP and try to build a good relationship with them rather than treating it as a black-box SaaS product that I don't need to interact with humans to use.
- biggc 4y agoI believe that Stripe EOL'd IRC support when Freenode imploded. They've got a Discord, but I've heard that it's harder to engage with engineers there than IRC because of the volume of "general support" chatter.
- joe4k 4y agoHad a similar issue during lockdown where we had more orders than usual. Stripe kept the money for 3 months. Contacting them for support is a non-existent (robot replies). Hope a competitor is taking notes to all this.
- jrs235 4y agoOne way to get a response, and a better than 120 days response, from Stripe is to file a complaint with the attorneys general offices of your state and the state that Stripe is incorporated in.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- TheRealDunkirk 4y agoThis started with Google, but we had years and years of stories just like this about PayPal too. We need regulation to prevent companies from throwing all user-account-related decisions to a neural network, and then not providing a way to dispute its output. YouTube and the copyright cartel is another good example. It's ridiculous to have to say this, but this is what you get when you no longer have a democracy (or representative republic) and, instead, have a full-fledged corporatocracy/oligarchy enabled by the Citizens United decision. Companies must be forced to staff up to handle the issues that their technology causes. Twitter and its moderation/banning/cancelation-of-accounts comes to mind as well. You can tell me that they have 10's of thousands of people working in this area, but it's clearly not enough. I'm sorry, but FAANG companies all LOVE to brag about how much money they make for their owners. They should be forced to spend some more of it on making sure they address flagrant mistakes in their automation systems. Aaaaalllllllll of that aside, MOST of the time, with these kinds of stories, there's usually more to it than is being said.
- Nitramp 4y agoI think an interesting meta take is the question why payment processors employ these draconic fraud protection mechanisms in the first place. I think it boils down to the prevalence of using simple magnetic stripe credit card payments. While chip-and-PIN or Google/Apple pay are of course also subject to fraud, not having even a first factor (pin/password/fingerprint) makes card copying and theft viable in the first place. I have no data, but I'd bet that you get substantially less fraud if you only process transactions with a first security factor, and you can probably still improve on that with a second factor (e.g. text message to authorize). As a consumer, I have to deal with declined transaction frequently (I moved which creates a mess for ZIP based "auth", another cause is using cards outside my home country); I find the whole situation hugely frustrating.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- zxcvbn4038 4y agoIf I remember correctly this is actually normal for CC processing, because the transaction is so much higher then usual, they are holding aside the money in case it gets charged back. Not like PayPal where they silently ban the account and money disappears forever, could understand it being pain if your a small business.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- patio11 4y ago(I work for Stripe, and since many of my colleagues are currently sleeping, taking the liberty of saying this on their behalf.) We are looking into things. As someone who ran businesses for a long time myself, it would be very alarming to me if customers felt they were being ignored while repeatedly talking to people who work for us. If that ever happens, please bring in literally anyone at Stripe, inclusive of other Patrick. Our email addresses are often available through a quick search of HN; mine is (predictably) patio11@stripe.com if you need it. We don't comment publicly on individual customers. This is an important part of customer privacy and we're serious about it. Sometimes situations which result in external complaints are the result of a process failure, and in those cases we try to fix the instant case and improve processes in the future. Sometimes they are the result of a process operating correctly but coming to a result which someone did not enjoy. The record available to the process is often more detailed than the record available to the public Internet, and may include extremely relevant context.
- TekMol 4y ago
- Crosseye_Jack 4y agoWhat percentage of people who walk into a business or go online to complete a transaction are able to send their payment via the lightning network compared to the percentage of people who walk in to do a transaction via Visa/Mastercard/Etc? The issue is Card payments and the networks they use. Doesn't matter if lightning settles transactions instantly if the customer wants to pay with Visa and Visa allows funds claw back for ~180 days. Normally a stores merchant account is kept open, so if a transaction is charged back a month later (and the bank and visa aggree with the chargeback) the money can be recovered from future sales. If the stores merchant account is closed because of "reasons" the payment provider can either use the funds the store has yet to cash out from the the payment provider as "insurance" against chargebacks until the deadline passes (at which case its safe to cash out) or start invoicing the store you just told to GTFO as a merchant to try and get the money back and then go recovery paths which is much more a nightmare for payment providers. I'm not saying I agree with the polices, just that I understand why they are in place, the payment providers are just covering their own asses at the end of the day.
- vilfredoparet0 4y agoA quote from Patrick Collison from one of the last "HN support threads": "We actually have an ongoing project to reduce the occurrence of these mistaken rejections by 90% by the end of this year. I think we'll succeed at it. (They're already down 50% since earlier this year.)" At this point it is obvious that he/his PR staff are lying. The only question is: What are some good Stripe alternatives?
- MauranKilom 4y ago> At this point it is obvious that he/his PR staff are lying. Without taking any stance on the problem at hand: How does an N=1 sample make it "obvious" that a 50% or 90% reduction has not taken place?
- peanuty1 4y ago> What are some good Stripe alternatives? Square is one. https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square/payments-api https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square/payments-api
- FpUser 4y agoMaybe bunch of small claim court cases could straighten them out? If Stripe did something like that to me I would certainly pursue this. My own experience is - I have a web store that sells my software products (we use both PayPal and Stripe) for many years. Size of transaction ranges from $10 up to $7000 (as far as I remember) So far there were no any significand holds / delays.
- tothrowaway 4y agoPutting my dang hat on. Related: Tell HN: Stripe brought my business to a dead stop - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21030633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21030633 - September 2019 Tell HN: Stripe shut down my 4-year business with no explanation - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28085706 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28085706 - August 2021 Stripe banned us for payment disputes but we never had a single dispute - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28522784 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28522784 - September 2021 Stripe Shut Us Down - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28881026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28881026 - October 2021 Help HN: Stripe shutting us down with 48 hours notice on a holiday skeleton crew - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29712023 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29712023 - December 2021 I'm probably missing a lot of threads.
- boringg 4y agoI'm no defender of stripe (or corporations) but the one thing I always find interesting is that a lot of the complaint stories are one sided as the company can't release any information due to privacy. Many times these complaint stories have cases of fraud or other problematic issues and use the public forum to generate publicity. There are cases of people getting caught up inadvertently as well.
- rchaud 4y agoWhat does it matter if it's one-sided? Reading the complaints and the seqience of events give me perspective on whether something like that could happen to me as a platform user. In the real world, I am not going to get Patio11 to respond as he's doing here. I'd get a CSR rep working off a script. So I don't really care what the CEO's POV is.
- the_watcher 4y agoPatio11 is one of the most responsive public internet users out there. On twitter, he’s not the absolute most responsive, but he has a standing invitation for anyone to contact him about nearly anything on his website, and he takes it very seriously[0]. I know multiple people at Stripe who have been asked to look into things he’s found out about, and he follows up. I won’t claim that he’s perfect about this, but I struggle to come up with anyone at any company of remotely similar scale that is more likely to do this. Disclaimer: I’ve somewhat recently gotten to know patio11 a bit, but he’d previously responded to my tweets and replied to my emails, long before our paths actually crossed. [0] https://www.kalzumeus.com/standing-invitation/ https://www.kalzumeus.com/standing-invitation/
- JonathanBeuys 4y agoHow much does Stripe charge for this service? Say you are a vendor who sells 1000 products a month for $100 each. So $100,000 in monthly revenue, split into 1000 payments. How much would you pay to Stripe per month? And how quickly can you move incoming payments away from Stripe?
- joshstrange 4y agoUnless you have a bulk deal (which you won't even at 1.2M/annual, though you are close IIRC) you are paying 2.9% + $0.30 (also assuming you aren't using any extras). > How much would you pay to Stripe per month? So ($100,000 * 0.029) + (1000 * $0.30) = $3,200 / mo > And how quickly can you move incoming payments away from Stripe? Not an easy question. Depends a lot on your payment stack and how you implemented Stripe. I can say that for myself it took ~100 hours to fully move everything over (both online and in-person payment system) as a solo dev. I ended up moving back to Stripe because the alternatives suck even more, or at least the one I picked.
- peanuty1 4y ago> I ended up moving back to Stripe because the alternatives suck even more, or at least the one I picked. Did you try Square? https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square/payments-api https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square/payments-api
- davemtl 4y agoAnd in typical Reddit fashion, the post was removed for bending the sub-reddit rules. It's frustrating that a popular and highly upvoted post like this is just _removed_. Anyone have the original content?
- dsissitka 4y agoGoogle cache: https://imgur.com/a/m0EybDN https://imgur.com/a/m0EybDN
- dsissitka 4y agoPasted below: TIFU by using Stripe as a payment processor for my small business. I used Stripe for about a year to run a small cell phone store in Denver, CO area. In the case of my business, I never had an issue processing my small payments for cell phones, ranging from a couple hundred dollars up to $1000. All of a sudden, we run a charge for $3300 because our primary processor in my business was down, and we had a large transaction to fulfill. Stripe flagged the transaction and is now holding the money from me for "at least 120 days" It is one thing to say this is a red flag, fine... I hear you... no problem. a transaction multiple times the size... sure. I get it. However A normal payment processor would then query you for documents authorizing the charge, bank statements, financial statements, some sort of procedure to remedy the issue. Stripe provides NO SUCH METHOD TO RESOLVE these issues. I am concerned because there are reports of Stripe continuing to add "30 days" to the reserve hold past the initial 120 days, indefinitely. One article detailed a hold that was surpassing its 240th day. Stripe is taking advantage of a lack of regulation in this space to steal small merchant's large transactions. They see a big, outlier transaction and lick their chops, hiding behind KYC and "Fraud prevention" To hold your money indefinitely. You cannot call Stripe. They do not have a phone number. Their support page on their website has Phone call and messaging grayed out. You can only email. If you email, you get robots. Even in the same email thread, a different "agent" (with a different name and everything) answers each time with not prior knowledge of your history. There are no ticket numbers to your support request; nothing tracking it. The robots respond with what is quite obviously a template response. If you do a little bit of research about this topic, you immediately see this is a prevailing issue. Reports of Stripe taking up to $31,000 are all over the internet! Again, Stripe gives no manner to remedy this. There is NO ONE you can call. NO ONE you can talk to. More disconcerting, it seems that anyone who posts about this issue on reddit gets downvoted and teamed up against by established Reddit accounts, that I have to imagine are owned by Stripe. These account have some established reddit history on them, mainly talking about coding in PERL. It's a little sus. In my case, I sent my EIN letter, Sales Tax Receipt, Articles of Org, Statement of Trade Name, Certificate of Good Standing, Bank Statements, Website links, Signed transaction receipts, and anything I could think of to Stripe to review. I just received robot-responses; never got anything cleared up. I challenge reddit to connect me to a human being at Stripe that can tell me how to resolve the issue. I'm convinced It can't be done. This is a big problem and should be brought to the attention of small business owners, and regulators! TL;DR : I used Stripe to process my business transactions. They saw a large transaction come through and used their twisted TOS to steal $3,000 from my small business. They use gray area contract loopholes to be able to hold your money from you indefinitely. While you lose out on your working capital and ROI, they collect free interest on your money; potentially never returning it.
- virtualmic 4y agoI couldn't read the story, as it has been deleted from reddit and maybe I am missing something here, but why don't these companies offer reliable one-time human support for a suitable fee?
- hnarn 4y agohttps://archive.ph/2022.07.28-123810/https://old.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/wa230m/tifu_by_using_stripe_as_a_payment_processor_for/ https://archive.ph/2022.07.28-123810/https://old.reddit.com/...
- slim 4y agoremoved. anyone got a cached copy?
- factsaresacred 4y agoThe post was deleted by the subreddit moderators so I hope HN don't mind me reposting it here: > I used Stripe for about a year to run a small cell phone store in Denver, CO area. In the case of my business, I never had an issue processing my small payments for cell phones, ranging from a couple hundred dollars up to $1000. All of a sudden, we run a charge for $3300 because our primary processor in my business was down, and we had a large transaction to fulfill. Stripe flagged the transaction and is now holding the money from me for "at least 120 days" > It is one thing to say this is a red flag, fine... I hear you... no problem. a transaction multiple times the size... sure. I get it. However A normal payment processor would then query you for documents authorizing the charge, bank statements, financial statements, some sort of procedure to remedy the issue. Stripe provides NO SUCH METHOD TO RESOLVE these issues. > I am concerned because there are reports of Stripe continuing to add "30 days" to the reserve hold past the initial 120 days, indefinitely. One article detailed a hold that was surpassing its 240th day. Stripe is taking advantage of a lack of regulation in this space to steal small merchant's large transactions. They see a big, outlier transaction and lick their chops, hiding behind KYC and "Fraud prevention" To hold your money indefinitely. > You cannot call Stripe. They do not have a phone number. Their support page on their website has Phone call and messaging grayed out. You can only email. If you email, you get robots. Even in the same email thread, a different "agent" (with a different name and everything) answers each time with not prior knowledge of your history. There are no ticket numbers to your support request; nothing tracking it. The robots respond with what is quite obviously a template response. > If you do a little bit of research about this topic, you immediately see this is a prevailing issue. Reports of Stripe taking up to $31,000 are all over the internet! Again, Stripe gives no manner to remedy this. There is NO ONE you can call. NO ONE you can talk to. More disconcerting, it seems that anyone who posts about this issue on reddit gets downvoted and teamed up against by established Reddit accounts, that I have to imagine are owned by Stripe. These account have some established reddit history on them, mainly talking about coding in PERL. It's a little sus. In my case, I sent my EIN letter, Sales Tax Receipt, Articles of Org, Statement of Trade Name, Certificate of Good Standing, Bank Statements, Website links, Signed transaction receipts, and anything I could think of to Stripe to review. I just received robot-responses; never got anything cleared up. > I challenge reddit to connect me to a human being at Stripe that can tell me how to resolve the issue. I'm convinced It can't be done. This is a big problem and should be brought to the attention of small business owners, and regulators! > TL;DR : I used Stripe to process my business transactions. They saw a large transaction come through and used their twisted TOS to steal $3,000 from my small business. They use gray area contract loopholes to be able to hold your money from you indefinitely. While you lose out on your working capital and ROI, they collect free interest on your money; potentially never returning it.
- joshstrange 4y agoSo this seems like a good time to tell my Stripe story. Let me preface this by saying I attempted to move to a different card processor late last year/early this year and despite 100+ hours of coding to fully integrate with them (and add features that were missing compared to our Stripe integration) I had to drop them due to what can only be described as lies about their rates (yes, I should have gotten this in writing instead of just over the phone but I was naive). All that said I had <1 week to switch back to Stripe before preorders started for the event and it was a breeze. Stripe has it's problems but I still think they are the best game in town. Now for my Stripe issue. Around the time I dropped the other payment processor I bought some Stripe M2 readers (Part of "Stripe Terminal" for in-person payments). At the same time I purchased a "Stripe Terminal Test Card" to use in the test environment. They have a simulated reader but I always prefer to use the same hardware as production to get a better feel for how it all works. The readers arrived and so did the card but for some reason I could not get the card to read, I kept getting back an error code of "6" [0] telling me that the card could not be read. If I scanned a real card it would scan and then fail when trying to auth the payment (understandable, I was in the "test" environment) but to me this proved the reader was working. I did some testing in "live" and all my cards were read/charged without issue. I opened a ticket with Stripe on May 6th. I had a similar "new rep every message" as the person in this Reddit post and my ticket would often go days/weeks without response (other than me begging for help). I followed every single instruction they sent, I provided all the debug info they asked for, I shot 4+ videos of the issue, nothing. Around June 2nd (almost a month after starting this process) I complained on Twitter and Stripe Support reached out (this did nothing, it might have gotten me a useless reply on the ticket but no real help). A Stripe employee also reached out directly to me via DM and we started an email conversation resulting in them just sending me 5 Stripe Test Cards to see if maybe it was just my card that was broken. About the same time Stripe sent another M2 reader and another Test Card (Note: in the interim I bought 16 readers for my event and had tried multiple of them to no avail, I was pretty sure it wasn't a problem with the reader and told them as much). I got all the new hardware and recorded a long video of me testing 3 M2 readers and 5 Stripe Test cards in every combination 3 (readers) x 5 (cards) x 2 (methods, dip/tap). I used their sample app and their sample backend (a ruby app running in a docker container) just to rule out any of my code. Same error every single time. I reported my results to both the employee and my support ticket and got no help. Support didn't reply, the employee talked about sending me card they had on their desk that they knew worked but that conversation petered out and I didn't want to bug someone who was going out of their way to help me. 10+ days would go by and I'd beg and plead for help in my support ticket with no reply, this repeated multiple times. Finally, on July 25th, 3 days ago, almost 3 months after starting this journey, Stripe replied to my ticket: > We have figured out that some of our Terminal physical test card inventory did not work. No. Fucking. Shit. This is something I suggested about a million times. All my cards had the same serial/batch/something number on the back and I had speculated it could be a bad batch and asked them to send me an opened/used card that they knew worked and/or check the number on a working card, they ignored all of this. They sent me 3 replacement cards and they sit next to me right now on my desk, unopened. My event is in 2 days and I don't have the time/energy to test them right now. All my energy is on testing the full setup on production but I might lose my mind if these are broken as well. My curiosity just got the better of me and I opened a card and the numbers on the back are different so that gives me some hope (all 7 cards I got from Support/buying myself had the same number). This is only 1 instance of shitty Stripe support, I have 2 others that I won't get into right now. I still love their docs/sdk/dashboard but I really wish their support was better. [0] https://stripe.dev/stripe-terminal-ios/docs/Enums/SCPReaderDisplayMessage.html#/c:@E@SCPReaderDisplayMessage@SCPReaderDisplayMessageTryAnotherReadMethod https://stripe.dev/stripe-terminal-ios/docs/Enums/SCPReaderD...
- pier25 4y agoAnd Reddit mods removed it...
- balentio 4y agoI wrote an article on this last year and submitted it here and got down voted into the lower levels of Hacker News hell. Later, of course, someone else has a similar experience with Stripe, and now everybody is all about it. It gets a frustrating trying to talk to tech people sometimes. I never know if they are going to be a shill mafia or actually consider the evidence.
- peanuty1 4y agoI recommend Square, it works great for my mom's business. https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square/payments-api https://developer.squareup.com/reference/square/payments-api
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- cdmoyer 4y agoThe OP later clarified that it wasn't a normal transaction. They sold a "cheap company van" using their stripe business account. That seems like a huge liability, since a used car seems extremely likely to cause a chargeback. I don't think dealerships would accept a credit card payment (other than deposit) for this reason. https://www.reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/wa1zob/dont_use_stripe_i_am_trying_to_save_you_from_my/ihyq7tl/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf&context=3 https://www.reddit.com/r/smallbusiness/comments/wa1zob/dont_...
- tomphoolery 4y agolmao why. why would you do this. just use square cash.
- arwineap 4y agoI enjoy the power of greenbacks, very visceral too.
- SyneRyder 4y agoAnd one of the comments below that one explains exactly why this is a problem: "When you sign up for your Stripe account, you had to state what business you were using it for. If you're doing business with your Stripe account that is not related to what you sign up for, then there are reasons why Stripe is now holding your money." It's listed in Stripe's terms and conditions on Prohibited Items: "Use of Stripe products to facilitate transactions on behalf of another undisclosed merchant or for products/services that were not disclosed in the merchant's Stripe account application." https://stripe.com/en-au/legal/restricted-businesses https://stripe.com/en-au/legal/restricted-businesses
- notinfuriated 4y agoMakes sense why this would raise a red flag, but it does not explain why Stripe supposedly had extremely shitty customer service where he can't get talk to a person and get this resolved in less than a week or two (let alone 120 days that is actually arbitrarily indefinite).
- KingOfCoders 4y agoFintech startup law: Every payment provider is becoming PayPal due to risk and regulatory pressure.
- igneo676 4y agohttp://web.archive.org/web/20220728124858/https://old.reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/wa230m/tifu_by_using_stripe_as_a_payment_processor_for/ http://web.archive.org/web/20220728124858/https://old.reddit... For anyone who is looking for the original story, which has been removed
- whiddershins 4y agoIt’s interesting that most are taking the Reddit post at face value, even though if the transaction were by a fraudster, the fraudster would probably have no compunction about lying on the internet.
- sleepyhead 4y ago"You cannot call Stripe" Ironic since Stripe requires a phone number to have an account and that phone number is required to be stated on the transaction receipt.
- blairanderson 4y agoAlternatively, I use Stripe as a payment processor for my small business and it works flawlessly.
- arein3 4y agoA solution could be to have a backup account for cases like this
- awinter-py 4y ago> used their twisted tos to steal three thousand > you cannot call stripe ... the robots respond solid problem statement on what next gen tos tools need to solve and also great alliteration in here
- andai 4y agoPost was removed, here is a snapshot https://archive.ph/a3GWU https://archive.ph/a3GWU
- sizzle 4y agoOP’s post was deleted, can anyone share what they wrote?
- archon810 4y agohttps://archive.ph/a3GWU https://archive.ph/a3GWU
- kory 4y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20220728105345/reddit.com/r/tifu/comments/wa230m/tifu_by_using_stripe_as_a_payment_processor_for/ https://web.archive.org/web/20220728105345/reddit.com/r/tifu...
- mnetcompany 4y ago
- s3p 4y agoThe post was removed. Anyone have a cached copy?
- tossl568 4y agoAnd they say Bitcoin has no use case